


For What It's Worth

by MBMallory (garnettrees)



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Character Death, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-05-18
Updated: 2003-05-18
Packaged: 2018-12-26 07:21:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12054081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garnettrees/pseuds/MBMallory
Summary: General O'Neill is curious about the strange linguist who claims to know him so well.Import from The Alpha Gate. Original Date: 5/18/2003





	For What It's Worth

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" (1967).

There are times-- just every so often-- when he's sure he's in the wrong place; but he knows he's right where he should be.

A man of action, General O'Neill-- he sees the lay of his life like land on a tactical map. There's youth in Chicago, memories of sitting on a stone wall with time stretching out like jaws to snap him up. And yeah, he gets that feeling these days, too. Childhood is a blur, too simple and easy and painful to remember; adolescence is anger looking for a place for blood to let. 'Wild,' he remembers his mother hissing over the phone, 'that child is simply running wild.' He snorted, turned away-- came in at all hours like an alley cat, stinking of where he'd been and strutting his independence. There's pain back there, too. The streets like enemy territory, in school he was a secret agent scrambling for cover-- so he figured, why not join the army and make it official. Jonathan O'Neill, a soldier; the young man who found structure and purpose in those barracks. He was a little less wild, but still kind of crazy. He had to be something of a lunatic, to rattle all those missions around in his head. He wasn't a bad boy, but people were still surprised when sweet, nice Sara Morrow took him home to meet Mom and Dad.

Dad, father-- there's that word, a title you earn, almost. Something he wanted to live up to. He held that squirming, red faced baby in his wide hands, amazed by the perfection of toes and fingers and eyes that were a mix of his own brown and Sara's green. Like childhood, he doesn't touch on this too often. He keeps it locked away, protected, and he can keep on moving so long as he knows it's there. Because, he knows, you can't think of that young boy's life branching out without thinking of the abrupt end. Of gunshots in the bedroom, child-sized coffin and the taste of his gun in his mouth.

They practically asked him if he wanted to die on that Stargate mission, but hey. Go figure, 'cause it's the army, right? And when he came back from the other side of the galaxy with nary a scratch, he found it so unfair and funny that he laughed when Sara took that last step out the door. Sometimes, it surprises him that he ever stopped laughing-- in the endlessness between two-fifty-nine and three a.m., he lifts a hand to his mouth to make sure he's not laughing still.

There's this... thing. He doesn't know what it is, but it's missing and he's hunting around for it in the dark, bumping into and breaking things in his haste to get his hands on it. It's not there, it's fallen down somewhere between the wall and he'll never find it now.

He's giving it a second try, the whole domesticity thing; grabbing for some normality because what he sees outside his office window is not an alley or a parking lot, but a wormhole. An event horizon, portal to other worlds, shimmering blue like eyes he's never seen. Even when he sits still, he's moving, though he tells himself this isn't because he's afraid to stop. However, on those rare occasions he does pause, it comes to him that he's lost-- he got off at a foreign station and all the signs, every direction is in some language that is familiar to him without letting him understand it. Sara used to say stuff like that, used to pause sometimes with her lips half-painted or eyelids half-shadowed in blue or dark gold, and say-- 'hey, Jack, if we weren't here now, were would we be?' A reality check, a look in the mirror-- that's why those panes of silver are so dangerous, because they make you see where you really are. Of course, he didn't give her credit. Just asked if it was that time of the month, brushed it off, 'where else would I be?'. Laugh a little, even if it wasn't funny. It's even less funny now.

So yeah, everyone's got to feel that way, on occasion. If I'd just called in sick that day, or gone to see Mom before the surgery, or put that gun under damn lock and key-- things would be different. They're not, and you can't do squat to change it. Why bother thinking about it? So he doesn't.

He's got Samantha-- she's bright and pretty, smart under her high cheek bones. They work well together, though she's a scientist and he's career military. Yeah, they make a good team, a nice match. When he retires, they'll have a condo out where he can fish, maybe a child. There will be no guns in the house. He'll do it right this time. He won't have to hide things, 'cause Sam's got the clearance-- their vision of the universe will be consistent with each other. In the future, she'll probably work part time and they'll live the rest off his pension-- he'll convince her that she doesn't need to give up her job to have a baby. He won't mind changing diapers when he's in his fifties, when most other retirees are migrating to Florida and playing the casinos. He wants a girl this time, he thinks-- maybe a boyish one that plays soccer and has freckles all over her nose, but a girl never the less. Girls, even the 'modern' kind, don't seem to want to play with guns. But it's still there, that off feeling-- a sense of possibility hanging like a branch just out of reach. Maybe he's being fanciful. Maybe he's making it up.

One time, he asked Samantha if she had that feeling-- 'you know, that deja vu thing, except you know it hasn't happened before'. They had a long discussion about quantum reality as she pocked her fork into their chicken-and-rice dinner; he missed most of it, decided that she was probably saying 'yes, but...'. He looks into her eyes-- which are blue-- and there are just those moments when he knows it ought to be someone else. Senility, it's got to be senility. Old age-- day dreaming. It's time to think about that retirement.

Only he looses his chance-- there are pyramids in the sky, like out of one of those crazy pulp science fiction novels. The world is wavering in lunacy, only this to him is sane. He's known all along things could go this way with the Goa'uld, he'd just thought they'd have more time to prepare, a childish hope that the 'gods' would loose interest and let the little humans play in their blue-green box of sand. Sitting in the command room, he wonders with a feeling of ice in his spine why he never let the scenario play out all the way, in his own mind. Why did he never let himself think about what would happen, in the end? He's going to play the hand he's been dealt; even if he ends up tilling soil on another planet-- instead of retiring in Minnesota-- and helps sire a first-generation extraterrestrial human.

* * *

  
At first, he holds out some hope. He thinks maybe they can beat this thing. Then he knows they can't. He thinks they still have a fighting chance. And sees Egypt and Europe and the Eastern seaboard flood and flare with red on the map. He thinks they need a miracle. And maybe he gets one.

"Unauthorized incoming traveler!"

Pausing halfway past the door to the briefing room, General O'Neill told himself to keep moving, willed his feet to step before the other, finding instead only stillness in his blood. Move-- said his soldier's mind to the knees that ached in the morning, to the feet that had pounded down the corridor early yesterday afternoon (was it only yesterday? my god. no god.) when the first shimmers of devastation appeared in Colorado's gray sky. They had been pale like the moon, those ships-- triangular, like a Dahli painting in the sky, so out of place. And even when he stood outside the mountain, with Samantha shivering at his side, he had not felt so helpless as all this. "Think, Daniel," mourned an unfamiliar voice, filtering through the chaos, through the threshold, to reach Jack O'Neill's ears. "Come on." There was a thump of frustration, and another, gaining in intensity as the words were repeated. "Daniel, think. Geeze!" Without meaning to, Jack turned and found himself peering in through the doorway. He stepped, shoulders straight and even, into the room, gazing on the familiar stranger with a fascination he didn't want to define. Cradling his hand, the young man calling himself 'Dr. Jackson' was looking away, head bent and hair obscuring his features. His pained hiss moved through the brown-blond locks, displacing them.

* * *

  
"Don't you know that when you pick a fight with a table, you can't win?" General O'Neill inquired, watching the pale face jerk up and reveal itself, glasses flashing. For just a fraction of a heartbeat, there was a smile there on those boyish features, relief and happiness with a fraction of annoyance to contrast the mix. It was gone, dowsed, before it was anything more than a snapshot in the general's mind-- Dr. Jackson, _Daniel_ (for surely such a young man must waver under such a stern title) was motionless and guarded. 

"Ah," the linguist murmured, infusing meaning into his startled, sub-English noises. "Oh." The head bent down again, eyes scanning the room from behind glass and hair once more. "Sorry," he said, hardly any apology in the tone. Daniel's sigh followed on the heels of the word, resigned and tinged with resentment. 

"Sir," O'Neill corrected, coming around the table to face Jackson without the barrier. 

"Hmm?" Daniel's hand skittered up to grab the pen he'd dropped, wielding it like a scimitar against the pad of paper Catherine had tossed aside. Symbols and numbers came to shuddering, nervous birth on the page. 

"You should have said, 'Sorry, sir'." Jack played the words for a reaction and, sure enough, those sky-just-pretending-to-be-blue eyes lifted from the page. Briefly, they locked gazes, Daniel's spine angling to move his chair just an inch or so away. 

"I'm a civilian," he muttered, "like your Carter." "_My_ Carter?" Jack stressed, mentally reviewing what Catherine had been at liberty to tell the young man. 

"Yes." A hand pushed glasses up and swept hair aside, "From your side of the mirror." O'Neill stood stiffly, watching as the fluorescent lights threw his shadow over the other man, the gray shape shifting as Daniel stretched and removed his glasses. When Jackson rubbed his temples, O'Neill glanced again at the mass of blue-inked characters making their way across the page.

* * *

  
"What are you working on, there?" He moved to take the notebook in hand as Jackson did the same-- flesh touched, and Daniel pulled away, staring off into somewhere. 

"That transmission you intercepted?" Phrased like a question, but really just a statement. "The spoken part was Abydonian. Er," he added quickly at Jack's look, "all Goa'uld speak at least a variant of it-- it's an evolved form of Ancient Egyptian. The rest of the message is tones, beats, really. It's a set of coordinates, numbers, that correspond to the symbols on the Stargate and indicate the planet the attack is originating from." 

"Pretty snazzy," the General didn't bother attempting to sound unimpressed. "If it's as simple as all that, why didn't Dr. Carter get it?" 

"Sam thinks of numbers in a mathematical way. It's her strength... it's like architecture," Daniel said with an unnerving certainty. "I think of them in a linguistic way. Almost all languages originally had characters that worked as both letters and numbers. She was looking for an equation, I think." His hand moved up, gripped the notebook at it's metal spiral-- Jack loosened his hand in surprise, and the young man smoothed his work back down on the table. Quietly, "There wasn't one." A lithe hand with strong, thin fingers brought the pen across the page again, then Daniel shook it, frowning. His next movement smeared a word into oblivion, but Jack was thinking of those hands, palms and sides stained just slightly blue. Firm, but too soft, capable, but not made to hold a trigger or grip a grenade. 

"Your hair's too long," O'Neill said past the feeling unraveling in his throat. Daniel's blotted palm came up to push at his glasses, transferring a smear of ink to his nose. They locked eyes again, the younger man pressing his teeth into his lower lip. 

"Like I said," Jackson muttered around the bite, "I'm a civilian." 

"Is that your answer to everything?" It was supposed to ring like a shot, but it didn't-- too blunt, too damped. Something fired with the silencer on. 

"Isn't being a soldier yours?" An eyebrow raised, and Jack saw his own face in those twin lenses, superimposed over the color of Daniel's eyes and the dark of his pupils. 

"What makes you think you know so much about me?" Jack sneered.

* * *

  
He watched Jackson's mouth form the beginnings of a word, but then his own hand was reaching for the phone, silencing it just seconds after it rang. With his eyes etching Daniel's form in all colors, he barked, "Yes?" A pause, and he could hear Daniel trying to listen, even over the sound of his own frantic scribbling. Kawalsky's voice trembled over the phone line, spitting out casualty figures and time limits. "Right," he said wearily, "Right. Dr. Carter thinks the Goa'uld will only be able to keep the wormhole established for so long. As soon as their power fails, we can dial up and start moving people to the beta site again. Keep the refugees coming." A hiss, a vile whisper, but Kawalsky's tone said it couldn't be helped. "They got the roads _already_?" Jack bit his lip, throwing a glance at Daniel, but the young man only moved his hand faster across the page, tore it off and began the charting on another. "Just get as many as you can. We're grasping at straws here." He slammed the phone down with all his rage in the fist holding it, felt his knuckles connect with the desk, but didn't even wince. Silence poured like those still red markers-- all over the world, Jack knew that 'life' as everyone defined it was shattering into tiny pieces they could choke on. He rubbed his smarting hand against the leg of his pants.

* * *

  
"Can't win a fight with a phone, either," Daniel remarked dryly. He risked a glance towards O'Neill, "And I don't know... anything, here. About you, or Sam, or Catherine... anybody. I can't figure you out. No context. You're Jack, but you're not." 

"Dr. Carter," Jack stressed, surprising himself, "mentioned something in the hallway about... parallel dimensions? Isn't that just a bad sci-fi plot contrivance?" 

"It's possible. In theory." Daniel rolled his eyes, the motion less condescending than it was simply... knowing, "It explains a lot about the nature of time and-- well, I'm an archaeologist, not an astrophysicist." 

"You really believe this?" Jack's voice was more than neutral, just a blank, empty space. He felt that hollowness in himself, like when he woke and his hands found the body lying next to his to be foreign and loved but simply not right. He thrust against the feeling violently. 

"Well," the younger man spread his hand to illustrate the point, "either I'm in a parallel dimension or I'm crazy. Now, mind you, the theory of insanity seems logical based on what we know, but it doesn't explain a lot. It would be nice if all these people we're really dying and this is all in my head." 

Jack stepped back a bit, only to find himself moving closer, "Oh?" 

"I mean," Daniel chuckled dizzily, and Jack saw weariness and fear ghosting across the other man's face, "What's one more mad man in a galaxy of lunatics. But if I'm crazy, that means..." With a shake of his head, Jackson clamped his lips shut, as if swallowing the words back down. 

"It means... what?" 

"It means--" Soft, too open and vulnerable to be here, in this place with devastation raining down like holy fire, "that I can't go home." They stood still, looking at each other-- the general straightened his back, as though there was an pane of glass at his side and he might possibly be a little more 

(tough, real, true, fortunate, strong-- worthy) 

than whatever was on the other side.

* * *

  
"Mighty nice delusion you have here," Jack joked tightly, turning away, though his mind conjured an image of the pain he somehow knew would be on Daniel's face. The silence that had stretched between them was too easy to move through, to comfortable against his shoulders-- he cut through it because he felt he could not afford it. 

"I've hardly started crawling under the wallpaper, yet," the retort was dry, laced with humor. "Things aren't all... that out of whack around here." 

"Do you want to be crazy, or not?" O'Neill turned swiftly, eyes tracing down the lines of the stranger's body, reading the young man's mood with frightening ease. 

"Doesn't matter," Jackson replied, quiet and full of understanding, "the galaxy-- this, or any other, hardly turns based on what I, or you, or anyone else wants." 

"Just wish you'd make up your mind," the general muttered, watching question flare behind those slightly smudged glasses. "One minute you say things are almost the same here, and the next you say this whole thing is insane." 

"It _is_ insane!" Daniel rose from his chair in a motion that was pure frustration, "My God, the _world_ is coming to an end out there! Everyone else believes reality to be something completely different from what I _know_ it to be." He stalked towards the other end of the room, away from O'Neill, and turned back just before he came to the wall. Hands moved, hovered, in agitation, "You said you didn't want to see me again unless I had pertinent information. What, you think my world has discovered a magic can of Goa'uld-away?" Daniel's blue gaze flickered up to O'Neill's face, and whatever he saw there made him shake his head in apology, "Geeze. I really have been hanging around Jack too long."

* * *

  
('as far as i'm concerned, you and i know each other very well' '...hanging around jack too long.' as in together, me and this young man. like that moment you wake up and the world is whitewashed, able to be anything you want before all the colors come down and define your life again.)

* * *

  
"I said I didn't want to see you," O'Neill said tersely, "because I don't need a bleeding heart heaping more guilt on my back when the next state over is in flames." The reality of four metal walls and the man enclosed with him seemed to stagger Jack, just for a moment. 

Daniel blinked rapidly, eyes flickering as if to follow the words, "Guilt?" Then, before the other man could summon words to his tongue, Jackson stepped forward, eager to soothe. "No, Jack... I didn't mean..." he took a breath, "No one ever has a right to blame you for any of the stuff this program has made you do. You just didn't have any other way, you were backed against the wall. I know that... but it doesn't make me forget that all these people are dying. I gave you the address for Chu'lak, and I think I knew what you were going to end up doing with it. I don't blame you." He reached out a hand to touch the camoflogue-clad shoulder, but Jack jerked away. 

"Who said I cared whether you did or not?" the general's eyes narrowed, then closed all together to block the other man out. "You admitted you don't _know_ me. Stop acting like you do." 

"Some things are the same here," Daniel clamped his lips down over the words. After a beat, he continued, somehow beaten, "Ra's dead there, Ra's dead here. Catherine's father found the Stargate there... same here. And," he took a breath, "Charlie is dead, there and here." At the moment, all Jack wanted to do was again spit those words-- 'why do you care?'-- like a defense, but there was a genuine sorrow moving slowly over Jackson's face.

* * *

  
Now they were standing almost toe to toe, but he didn't remember either of them moving. O'Neill closed his eyes, listening to Samantha's whispered briefing to him in the hallway-- she was saying that maybe they could use the assistance of the Dr. Jackson from this reality (this is plain freak'n _nuts_) but... but no. Dead, she'd hissed, and he'd been glad she wasn't looking at his face. The Daniel of this world was in Egypt, dead and unconcerned by the Stargate. Jack had the sudden image of a train rushing by him through the darkness of a tunnel, and he was standing on the platform, ever bone in his body feeling it go by. Just a little too late, just the wrong stop, the wrong step-- deja'vu all over again, only it's never happened before. 

"Even," Daniel smiled a little, "the scar on your eyebrow." The safe darkness behind the general's eyelids fell away-- there was the boy calling himself Jackson, with his fingers raised just so in the air, to indicate the dent in the soldier's toughened skin. "Did you get that in Iraq?" the eyes were far away, "I never asked." 

Without meaning to, Jack caught that lithe hand in his own, "You said you know your me very well." There was a flicker in those blue eyes that were mirrored in brown-- reflected endlessly by those glasses; something about ownership and karma and prying what you could from the cold, dead fingers of Fate. "Yes, my Jack-- The Jack from my dimension," Jackson stumbled to correct, letting a breath out to erase the words. "We know each other very well. He's my friend... prob'ly," said with just the slight the slur of a petulant child, "the only real one I've ever had." They were close now, too close. The general hand two gentle hands on that which God or Fate or Whatever would have denied him. 

O'Neill's voice was low, "Is that so?" "You don't believe me?" Daniel tilted his chin up, and Jack could smell the nervousness on him, the fear and lingering antiseptic scent of the infirmary clinging tight. "I believe you," the words rolled heavy off Jack's tongue, husky and too true.

* * *

  
Unasked, a question wavered between and against the both of them; O'Neill lifted his hand from it's place on the young man's arm, ghosting a single finger against Daniel's temple. The blue eyes closed, a lid thrown down to keep a secret out of sight, and then Daniel was laughing. It was hard and deep and raw on his throat, a sound Jack had heard echoing off dirty, desert-baked prison walls. 

"What's so funny?" he asked, resisting the urge to shake the other man, to make that sound snake back down to where it had come from. 

"Jack," Daniel managed between the shaking hysterics, "Jack's always making these... jokes about the Stargate. The Wizard of Oz," he chuckled, rolling his eyes, seeing memories from a life General O'Neill had never lived. "And I just thought of it-- it's the ruby slippers pinch... there's no place," he giggled helplessly, laughter translating into a few scattered tears. "No place like home!" 

O'Neill took one step forward, caught Daniel to him with an ease that surprised him-- he patted the shaking back tersely, stiffly, held on tight despite himself. "S'okay," he said, because he knew that Daniel wasn't crazy. Knew it until it cut him to the quick, until he was sure that-- should he live through this-- he would wake shivering with sweat on a warm summer night, next to Samantha but grasping towards that which never should have been. His name was being whispered-- once, twice-- against his neck, but not calling to him. 

"No," Jackson shook himself harshly, fought free and returned to his seat with all the sudden calmness of a person who didn't really want to be seen. He took pen to the paper again, began writing stargate symbols with panicked lines. "Don't you have command stuff to be doing?" He didn't look up, and O'Neill dropped his arms from the vanished shape he'd been holding. "Hardly anything we can do, until Dr. Carter gets the Stargate under our control again," the general considered, stuffing his hands in his pockets, "I've got my men mining every level with C-4, but we're on the defensive, now." 

"Uh-huh." Back to small noises, eyes averted down to concentrate. "Well," the linguist muttered, making a quick check over what he'd written, "I've got the address now-- for the origin of the attack." He copied it with quick clarity onto a fresh sheet of paper, tearing it out and pushing it across the desk. 

"Right," Jack glanced down only briefly. Taking a few steps backwards, he tried to make his vocal chords work the way he wanted them to-- to communicate this whatever-it-was- settling in the hollow at the small of his back. The muscles could not, or would not, obey; he retreated to the threshold. "For what it's worth..." 

Daniel sat lax in the chair, head tilted up and eyes closed, "Don't..." 

And so the general didn't-- wondering what it was he would have said.

* * *

  
So. Right, he said to himself, marching down those bare metal corridors with his fist closed around the coordinates. There was an iron to his bones he hadn't felt before, to mask and enclose this new feeling, to keep it secluded and away. A good thing, really, a safe defense, because when he came into the conference room, he saw the red defeat over Egypt and was certain it was blood.

He has to pick up pieces of himself in order to reach wakefulness. The heat is all around him, curling too close, but Daniel Jackson barely feels it. Through the crisscrossing cracks in his glasses, he sees the clutter of artifacts and bodies strewn carefully over the sand. Companions, workers, all killed by the scaffolds as they fell, by rocks or-- well, there are small fires, burning here and there. His hands reach out, trying for pulses and retrieving pit of clay as he gathers enough strength to climb to his feet; but there are no heartbeats, and everything seems so much beyond repair. Shock has blasted his pre-waking thoughts from his mind-- the world is strange and full of luminous fear. He knows, with the instinct of a child's throat clutching around a warning, that the chains are about to break and fall.

* * *

  
The world is all painful yellows and oranges-- even the sky is a dull kind of lemon, with it's two pyramids casting shadows their shadows over the sun. The impossibility of it all makes Daniel dizzy, but he locks his knees and moves up the dune, unable to focus on anything save the sheer mechanics of walking. It hurts to think, to breathe, and he smells the dead around him like some grotesque ceremony's incense. These bodies aren't going to last long, not in this heat. Reaching the top of the dune, he falls to his knees without thinking, and the sand moves to embrace the lines of his body. He's holding a piece of pottery, with the beginnings of what could be either the glyph for sun or star-- the bottom part has broken off. Raising his eyes to the uneven horizon, he sees the pyramids of Giza has he has so often in his life-- a familiar image. The comforting landscape has been made surreal, because there's a smooth, chrome-glossed pyramid sitting atop the ones he knows. He was right in so many ways, he thinks, blinking at the glints of sun gathering around the base of the structure. Armor. Soldiers, he realizes after shielding his eyes, and a voice he's never heard before tells him he'd better fall back and take cover. He stumbles down the sandy angle he just recently climbed, loosing his footing and making small sobs that he never does realize are coming from him.

* * *

  
Someone else built the pyramids, he'd said. Jeers from the audience, laughs and shakes of heads. Condescending looks that made his bones shrink back to childhood. Well then, they asked, who did? He said that he didn't know, and watched them leave, carrying their laughter in their throats. The few who stayed whispered in mock sympathy. Do you think it was aliens, Dr. Jackson? The greys they have over in the bunker at Area 51? Gods, immortals, creatures of light? The tooth fairy? But-- and he could shout wildly, spin like a madman with hands up to grip his victory-- he was right, damn it, right because here as a technology he'd never seen using the pyramids in a way no one had ever imagined. The last laugh is really wail of despair.

* * *

  
He sits, folded amongst the corpses of his excavation team, near the mouth of a tomb of a little known King. The sun seeps into him like radiation, burning his shadow against the sand. Memory takes her time rising from the depths of Lethe-- he remembers the screams of panic and the flash of silver gliders, like the elegant arches of cranes' wings. This is the end, someone had been saying as he fell into unconsciousness, this is the last day of our world. The hairs on the back of Daniel's neck rise, mattered down by drips of sweat. Colors jump and shapes waver in a crazy native dance as he reaches behind his head, but his fingers come away red. (the red nile, flowing crimson and inspiring thirst. let my people go!) He realizes that he is bleeding, before his body becomes too heavy to hold up. The sun flays him naked and crying in his dreams.

* * *

  
Someone is shouting, but it's not him. Awake again, blinking painfully in his delirium, he crawls towards the sound. It's in the sand, or half buried under it; he turns over the scorched body of an Egyptian woman to find the girl-child wailing underneath. Were they trying to run? From what? (from what indeed, my good doctor. there are pyramids in the sky, what indeed!) Briefly, he touches the woman's burned back, and her skin peels away like paper-- a type of wound he's never seen before. The girl's hands are in her mother's crumbling pieces too, and he pulls her away, gently covering her mouth when her scream begins to sing again. He can hear marching, the pound of feet on the sand, and it lodges in his back, too terrible to be fear. The girl clutches him madly-- they are together in their fear-- and he feels the press of something hidden under her dress against his side. It hurts, but he can't focus, can't think what it might be. Half-carrying her, he stumbles back towards the partly collapsed mouth of the tomb. Hidden in vague shadows, he holds her in his lap, brushing the dark tendrils of hair from her cheek. She's all varying shades of night-brown, this girl-- hair, eyes and dusted tan skin. Her pupils are moons, dark and alien, widening as he hears rustling outside the tomb. Their hearts beat long, low and loud, bound by want of a human hand to hold. She can't be more than eight, and outside her mother is shifting away like leaves in the wind. "I know," he murmurs in Arabic. "I'm scared too." The girl clutches at him until her tiny nails pierce his flesh, but he doesn't care. He's very sure he's about to die, he can smell the Reaper and see the flash of the scythe down in the darkened passageway.

* * *

  
Rocks are moved, shafts of light fall with the same deadliness as bombs. Daniel jerks up to see the faces of Earth's conquerers, and they are much like his own-- two eyes, human face and lips and nose under the blazing gold emblem of a snake. (maybe i expected them to have green skin, two heads, tentacles, i don't know) Another flash, metal again, but out of the other corner of his eye; the linguist turns in time to hear the thunderclap, to see the slight recoil of the handgun clutched in the little girl's grubby palms. (girls, even modern ones, don't seem to want to play with guns) One down, God only knows how more to go; there's the alien invader slumped over the rumble with a hole in his head. (they can die, like humans) Her hands, her arms, her whole body is shaking, but the girl doesn't let go. It occurs to Daniel that he does not even know this child's name, and when another face appears, she clicks the trigger again and again. There is no sound this time, only the moan of an empty barrel. Wolf-like, she bares her teeth-- she is as angry as all the survivors will be, Daniel thinks. Understanding of death flitters over her face, animalistic and vague; she's frightened by what she has done. Her sweat smells of terror and pain. He moves to pull her back, time flowing far too slow, but this next enemy's face has an rage that eclipses hers. The alien soldier takes quick aim and looses on the child not a bullet, but a net of light that plays and burns against her young skin. Again, and she jerks in the throws of the electricity's embrace. A third time, and she's falling to pieces in his hands, disappearing in darkness and light. Shifting away. (my turn now)

* * *

  
The first blast hits him with all the force of a wave, lifting him up to pain he didn't even know was possible. Through his own screaming, he seems to hear words; through the inferno, he feels gentle hands lifting him up. He is still on the ground, and the second blast is shaking him, but he feels these these ghostly touches all the same. There is someone's quirky half-smile, a familiar stranger's face, blazing in his mind. This person is saying, 'Hey, Daniel-- I think we got cheated this time around. They didn't even give us a chance. Let's say we, you and me, give it another go?'. Dr. Jackson feels arms coming to cradle him as the third blast devours his body whole.

* * *

  
.... but that just might have been something a soldier imagined, facing the cool eyes of a Jaffa and the beam of a zat'nic'atel as they ushered him to Death.


End file.
